Monday, April 25, 2016

HUBweek 2015 Day 1: De-Stress Boston

Now that plans are underway for
HUBweek 2016 (slated to run from Sep. 25 – Oct. 1, 2016), it’s about time I
wrote up my posts on HUBweek 2015. I will update this preface each time I add a
post. I had been planning to attend HUBweek since it was first announced by its
sponsoring partners (Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, Harvard, and The
Boston Globe) back in December 2014.

As HUBweek approached and the agenda
crystallized, I started mapping out the events and locations, just as I would
for a conference, weighing both how interesting the topics sounded and the logistics
of getting around to the various locations scattered across Boston and
Cambridge. Here was my planned itinerary:

De-Stress Boston

Our attendance at De-Stress Boston
began with a little driving/parking stress, as we left the house just slightly
later than planned, and then hit traffic on Storrow, so if we didn’t park at
the hospital, we’d miss the talk entirely, and so I sort of had to lie to the
security guy at the entrance to the hospital parking garage, saying that we
were indeed a patient and/or visitor. In our defense, Susan’s foot was still in
a walking boot, and we really had a legitimate medical need to park nearby, but
lying is stressful, as many studies have shown. It’s how lie detectors work,
picking up the tiny physiological changes our bodies make when suppressing the
truth. Lucky for me, they don’t have those rigged up at the entrance to parking
garages. Recent studies also show that stress can increase the likelihood of
cheating/lying (Weintraub, 2015).

This brings up the entire debate about
how much of our behavior is a reflection of one’s individual
personality/character, and how much is merely situational, a function of one’s
current life circumstances. We hadn’t even arrived at our first HUBweek event,
and look at how much debate and introspection it had already generated for us! Yes,
yes, of course, I am fully aware of the horrible irony that we were getting
stressed out on our way to a talk about stress reduction.

After an introduction by John Henry,
Dr. Herbert Benson spoke of how the relaxation response had moved from a hippy
alternative concept in the 70’s to being accepted by mainstream science and
medicine as a real, practical, and effective way to improve health by
decreasing stress, resulting in tangible physiological changes and effects at
the cellular level. By invoking the relaxation response, we can attain a
quieter mind and improved perspective. What may have seemed like the worst
thing imaginable now seems manageable. This reminded me of a bit of advice that
Colin Powell shared during his talk at last year’s Sage Summit. When first
presented with bad news, he would say to himself: “It’s not as bad as you think,”
fully acknowledging that this was “not a plan, but a hope,” but one that allowed
him to maintain some calm during crises.

It’s noteworthy that meditation is now
being proposed as an effective tool in managing things like Post-Traumatic Stress
(PTS). Back in the day, meditation was something that only hippies did. When an
old friend of mine was at Basic Training in the Army, back in the late 1980’s, the
instructor was quizzing the class on various acronyms, and he asked my friend,
“What does TM stand for?” She was pretty earthy-crunchy, and so the only thing
she could think of was “Transcendental Meditation,” which just made him get
agitated. “Tran-sen-what?!” Of course, the correct answer is Technical Manual.

Dr. Benson led us through a little
practice meditation, and the next speaker had us do some chair yoga. There’s an
awful lot of work that goes into doing and thinking nothing, quieting and
stilling the mind. The speaker suggested using a word or phrase, as “words do
focus us.” The problem with words is that there are simply so many to choose
from. I had trouble deciding on a good word or a fitting phrase, and so that
was a little stressful. I put it on my list of things to do, to come up with a good
word or phrase.

The next speaker, Zach Valenti, showed
off his Project Uplift that “game-ifies stress reduction.” Using a headset and
a giant globe, the deeper you relax, the higher you lift the globe, providing immediate
gratification and visible, tangible evidence of your relaxation progress. Part
of me wanted to try it during the break, but a long line had formed very
quickly, and lines stress me out. Plus, I tend to be just a little bit
competitive, so I would have wanted to lift the globe higher than everyone
else, and I would have been bummed out if I couldn’t even get it off the pad.

We moved from our back row seat in the
balcony, to a table on the veranda with a better view overlooking the stage. As
the next series of speakers were getting ready to talk, we found ourselves
getting drawn in by the smell of soup from a nearby table. Was that clam
chowder? Or, would that be calm chowder? Ha ha. We soon found ourselves making
our way downstairs to the Eat Street Café, getting a nice cup of hot chicken
noodle soup, which I highly recommend: savory, hearty, comforting.

I’d feel bad about our little detour
to the MGH cafeteria, but it turned out to be quite handy, when we returned to
MGH just a few weeks later, quite unexpectedly, after a friend had a heart
attack.

In the process of making our way to
the cafeteria, it was hard not to notice the faces of the various caregivers,
nurses, doctors, and aids we saw along the way: They all looked so stressed.
They probably needed the De-Stress Boston talk every bit as much as we did, and
maybe even more. But, if you think about it, maybe it’s understandable. Their
jobs deal with life-and-death decisions and consequences. In many lines of
work, you can remind everyone to maintain perspective, and that every decision
is not a life-and-death matter. Except that at a hospital, it is
life-and-death. Or, at least, it might be. It could be. How do you deal with
that? There are a number of jobs that carry similar gravity: police, fire,
pilots, soldiers, engineers. While some of these fields rely on a certain level
of heroism/bravery/honor, how do you make the constant stress of life-and-death
decisions manageable? The answer in many cases: policies, protocols, values,
and standards. Take it out of the individuals’ hands. Institute checklists. It
works for airlines, why not the medical field? Use feedback loops to ensure continued
learning. Give people the tools to know they did the best they could under the
given circumstances.

There is an old episode of “Scrubs,”
where the old curmudgeon doctor and the resident, played by Zach Braff, get
into a competition in treating two patients with the exact same symptoms. They
both come up with the same diagnosis and treatment plan, but Zach Braff’s
patient dies, while the older doctor’s patient lived. The young resident asks
why. The older doctor says, “You forgot something…” Before he can finish, the
young resident rushes off to do more research, tormenting himself, thinking that
if he had only done something different, his patient would have lived. At the
end of the show, the older doctor comes to him and finally explains: The
resident had done everything right, but he had forgotten one thing: Sometimes
people just die, even when we do everything right. It’s not all in our
control.

And, sometimes we patients probably
forget that doctors are just human, not superheroes, as much as we and others
and maybe even themselves would like to make them out to be otherwise. They’ve
not been imbued with special powers; they just know what they know, but they
don’t know everything. The inner workings of how the human body sustains life
is a universe yet to be fully explored and understood.

Bellies full, and feeling just slightly
less stressed, we embarked for home. Irony of ironies, the drive home was
equally stressful, though, as I got in the wrong lane at what used to be
Leveritt Circle. “Are we going home to Watertown via the Zakim Bridge?” “No, of
course not.” No, instead, we took 93 South to the Pike, through the bowels of
the new and improved Big Dig depressed Central Artery. Traveling on 93 South, a
giant Peter Pan bus the size of a townhouse goes hurtling past in the lane next
to me, and then my exit lane splits off into oblivion, re-surfacing into a microscopic
merge zone. It all works – on paper – but I can’t help but think: wouldn’t it
have been nice if they could have had the benefit of a 3-D model or virtual
reality tour prior to construction? Of course, 3-D printing is a topic for
another day.

After taking Susan home, my next stop that
afternoon would be Fenway Forum, a Master Class with Professor Michael Sandel.

Post
Script

I always see getting lost as an
opportunity for picking up clues that might come in handy in some way in the
future. It’s part of my incorrigible belief that everything happens for a
reason, and some studies in the field of psychology show that we might just be
wired to think that way. Little did I know, but my visit to MGH turned out to
be just the start of my tour of the major hospitals and healthcare systems (and
their cafeterias) in the metropolitan Boston area. But, that’s a topic for
another blog, another day.

I was recently going through our book
cases at home and found Dr. Benson’s original book, and added it on to my
ambitious 2016 reading list:

Art
& Fear, by David
Bayles and Ted Orland. This one came as a recommendation via Stu Rook of Lux
Lisbon, congrats on the sold-out show at Scala London on 21 April! One of the
most interesting concepts I found in this book was the fundamental difference
between art and science; the expectation that scientific results be
reproducible and objective, while art is expected to be original and offer a
unique perspective, and so in this way they are almost diametrically opposed.

Presence, by Amy Cuddy

The
Varieties of Religious Experience,
by William James (father of American Psychology, but just as much a
philosopher); thank you to Dr. Nancy Etcoff for the recommendation.

Rose
Schmidt is the author of “Go Forward, Support! The Rugby of Life” (Gainline
Press 2004). Use of individual quotes with proper citation and attribution,
within the limits of fair use, is permitted. If you would like to request permission
to use or reprint any of the content on the site, please contact me. Twitter handle: Rosebud@GainlineRS

About Me

Welcome to Rosebud’s Blog! I started writing weekly columns in college, and while it has been a few years, I never really lost the itch to write these thoughts down. I gathered a collection of ideas together and strung them together in my first book, “Go Forward, Support! The Rugby of Life” (2004 Gainline Press). Now I am writing again. Each piece is a contemplation of everyday life, and what can be learned from it. I believe two things:
(1) Everything happens for a reason (we may not learn the reason in this lifetime), and (2) There is something to be learned from every experience. Follow me on Twitter @GainlineRS.
"Go Forward, Support! The Rugby of Life," by Rosemary A. Schmidt (2004, Gainline Press, ISBN 978-0-9708528-1-9, available on Amazon.com) is a philosophical contemplation of rugby and the meaning of life. With some photos, recipes, poems, and quotes thrown in, it is in essence "a love song to rugby," but accessible to both players and non-players alike. You are what you read - what are you hungry for?